Reliability, Consistency, Trust

I have a friend who drops me off and picks me up at the airport every time I have to travel by air, regardless of the hour, the weather, or what else is going on in her own life that day. Departure is slightly less of an issue, because if at the 11th hour she isn't available I can make a plan with a neighbour. But that has never happened. She's been doing this for years. As for coming home, there is never a question of whether she will be there. The flight could land at midnight in a snowstorm and she would still be at the curb, at our agreed spot, on time, with the car toasty warm.

That is reliability in its plainest form.

A person doing the specific thing they said they would do, when they said they would do it, often enough that you stop bothering to wonder whether this time will be different. It sounds like a small thing until you notice how much of your own life quietly depends on a handful of people who behave that way, and how unsettled things get the moment one of them stops.

What it looks like when it works…

 When reliability is working, you take it for granted. You don't look for it, because it is always there.

A colleague who does what she says she will do becomes someone you don't double-check, and the energy you would otherwise spend on a person you didn't trust to be fully reliable is preserved for something more useful: no following up, no bracing for disappointment, no quiet contingency planning running in the background. So too at home. A parent who shows up consistently in the same way is a sort of security blanket: solid ground that a child can leave and come back to. And the child who has their feet planted on that solid ground tends to take more chances elsewhere, because of the consistency of the parent.

 But then…

In an organisation, a team that can count on its own leadership and its own processes works steadily and productively because its people know what's going on and what to expect. They know they can count on the system and the leadership to provide them with the stability they need to deliver what's expected of them. That consistency supports the trust that provides the stability and connection.

What strikes me, even in a relationship that is otherwise working well, is how little the reliable person ever hears about their reliability, if at all. It is taken for granted. It simply is who you are, until the moment you're not. Then you get called out for your failure, for breaking the pattern of reliability.

What it looks like when it fails

Reliability rarely fails all at once. It usually gradually shrinks through a string of small things, such as a deadline missed, or a promise not quite fulfilled and then explained away. Then the explanation that sounded fine on its own, as an isolated glitch, starts to form a pattern after you have heard three or four of them. What I notice in conflict resolution work is that the missed deadline or the broken promise is usually not the real trust breaker. The worst part is what happens once a person can no longer predict what the other one will actually do.

 Our relationships run on that kind of prediction far more than we realise, and once the predictability goes, the cost of not knowing what to expect tends to outweigh the cost of whatever was originally promised and not delivered.

There is something else: a pattern I see often and used to find puzzling. A single broken promise can outweigh years of kept ones, completely out of proportion to what a fair accounting would suggest. Part of the reason is simply how we are built to pay attention. A letdown grabs us and stays with us in a way that a long stretch of things going fine never does, because the things that are going fine rarely require anything of us, while a letdown demands to be dealt with right away.

 Let's take a weather analogy. In Johannesburg, South Africa, where I grew up, we took nice sunny summer days for granted. Regular summer thunderstorms soaked everything down between 4.30 and 5.30pm, then the sun came out again, and the birds were full of song. Then something happens and we wake up to an overcast sky for four days in a row. What do we talk about? The terrible weather, whereas it didn't occur to anyone to mention the sunshine before. By contrast, in Nova Scotia, if there’s a nice sunny day, everybody comments on it. It is a rare treat and a privilege. (Until it has been two weeks with no break in the sunshine, then we panic because this is the beginning of a drought.)

 Thus, at work one bad month can colour the five good years that came before it, not because the five years stopped counting but because our minds keep score unfairly.

In my work I often sit across from people trying to repair a relationship after one serious breach, with the person who broke the consistency pattern trying to offer a long, solid record of reliability, only to find the other person unmoved by it. That asymmetry is not a failure of character on either side. It is closer to how human attention actually works.

I'm very prone to look at matters I don't fully understand or cannot explain, in evolutionary terms. If this is how we behave, as a species, under these circumstances, what is the evolutionary advantage of it? Because if there were no evolutionary advantage, we would have changed these thinking and attention span patterns thousands of years ago.

Think of a path our ancestors in Africa walked regularly, consistently, because it led somewhere the survival of the group depended on: a freshwater spring, a stand of fruit trees, the field where the antelope grazed. That path was part of their survival lexicon precisely because it was reliable. It delivered what it promised, consistently, and the mind therefore filed it in the survival niche of the brain, as settled, as known, as safe to use without deliberation. And then one day there was a predator on the path. A hungry leopard, on the move; not a permanent feature. Its presence did not change the direction of the path or what the destination was. The value of the path remained the same. The hungry leopard was merely a new and unpredictable variable that did not belong in the pattern. The group would have taken defensive action. They may even have killed the leopard and saved the skin for their leader to drape around his shoulders to signify his power. But they did not abandon the path. It was still the reliable route to the delicious sycamore figs and kei apples. The spring was still burbling fresh water, and the herds of pretty and delicious impalas were still going to be hanging around the grassy plains they love to graze.

What those ancestors of ours did was add a layer of vigilance, a heightened alertness to the thing that had no consistency, no predictability, and therefore carried a risk the rest of the pattern did not. They focused on how to predict it and how to protect against it, because an anomaly in a survival routine is precisely the thing that can kill you if you let familiarity with the route placate you into forgetting it was there. And so, from then on, they would still walk that path, at their usual pace, but there would be an alertness about them, noticing anomalies: a cat footprint, the birds suddenly silent, a stretch of grass shifting slightly while there is no wind. They would pause. The leader would go forward, with his assegai or club at the ready, to check for the carnivore that could disrupt the entire food-gathering venture by killing one of them, for his food.

 I'm reading Daniel Kahneman at the moment. He spent much of his career mapping what this ancient wiring looks like from the inside. His finding, broadly, was that the mind runs two systems at once, one fast, intuitive, and largely automatic, and one slower, more deliberate, and much more reluctant to engage. The fast system is the one keeping watch on the path. It is the one that flags the predator, maintains the adrenalin rush. It counter-acts the complacency of the slower system reliant on consistency: the predator's presence requires a break in the consistency pattern.

Eric Edmeades identified something he calls the Evolution Gap: the distance between the creatures we remain in evolutionary terms, and the social world we have built around us in the last few hundred years, a world we have changed far faster than we are capable of changing ourselves. So that ancient primitive software, running slow and fast, is still running and serving a purpose. The path now leads to the comfort and safety of a shared office or a family kitchen, and the predator is a missed deadline or a broken promise.

 The person sitting across from you in the mediation room who cannot be moved by the telling of a decade of solid history of reliability is not being unreasonable. They are running survival software that is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And the person arguing the strength and validity of that decade of solid history is not being unreasonable either. They have done what reliable people do, shown up, followed through, kept the path safe, and they are genuinely bewildered that none of it seems to count now that a predator appeared on it once. Both responses are human. Both make complete sense. The disruption has simply activated two different parts of the same ancient system, and they are now sitting across a table from each other, each convinced the other is not seeing clearly.

This is where the art of mediation comes in.

The mediator's job is not to argue either person out of their position, because both positions make complete sense. Sometimes a single sentence is enough to shift the conversation: "I can see that something that felt reliable to you has been disrupted, and I want to make sure we understand what that has meant for each of you before we go any further."

 Trust, reliability and consistency are not the same thing.

This is also where reliability and trust part company, even though we tend to use "trust" and "reliability" as though they mean the same thing, with "consistency" an element of both. Trust speaks to our belief in, and reliance on, a person's character and intentions. Reliability is the narrower, more everyday question of whether what they did lined up with what they committed to. You can trust someone completely, believe in their intentions without reservation, and still find you can no longer rely on their follow-through. The goodwill is still there. The structure it was built on has gone. And if the structure remains damaged or missing, that cornerstone in the foundation of trust starts crumbling.

 We tend to use "reliability" and "consistency" as though they were interchangeable, and the mix-up causes damage, both at home and at work. Consistency is a pattern that keeps repeating in the same shape, whether or not that shape still does anyone any good. Reliability is whether a person actually delivers what is needed, but we need to acknowledge that what is needed shifts over time. A person can stay perfectly consistent while quietly becoming less and less reliable.

I think of a contractor I engaged for small jobs around my house, three summers running. He was never on time. He always quoted low and finished high. And yet he was entirely predictable, because that was exactly what happened every single time: the same lateness, the same overrun, the same decent work once he finally got to it. That is consistency in a clean, almost textbook form. It is not reliability, because what he actually promised, a time and a price, was never once true. What kept me calling him back was not confidence that he would do what he said. It was familiarity with a pattern, a willingness to plan around it rather than expect it to change, plus the remarkably good quality of the work he did do when he showed up. The price was steeper, but still tolerable. So I called him back. But not for the fourth time. I stopped at number three. Reliability outweighed consistency when I had to make a home repair decision again. I could not trust him to be reliable in sticking to his quote and timeframe, and had had enough of the inconvenience and expense. His consistency ultimately broke my trust.

 Take a manager who handles every problem brought to her the same way, regardless of what the problem actually calls for. She is being consistent. Whether she is also being reliable depends entirely on whether that one fixed, predictable response habit still solves what is in front of her. In most environments there comes a point where it stops. She could be relied on to behave consistently; she could not be relied on to solve all the problems she confronted.

The same thing happens in families. A parent settles into one way of offering support, maybe advice, maybe just being there quietly, and that way can go on for years. It is a pattern I see often in family mediation work. What the parent rarely sees is that the child in front of them has grown up, has developed agency, the capacity to think and act for themselves, and wants to be the one making the decisions now. The parent keeps offering the same thing they have always offered: "here, let me do that for you," "this is how you do it, watch," "careful, you're going to hurt yourself." And one day the adult child finally says it out loud: I am not a child any longer, stop treating me like one. The parent had stayed consistent. They just never noticed their child had grown past what that consistency was offering. The child's needs had changed, and something different was called for.

Part of why this gap goes unnoticed for so long is that consistency is the kind of thing we accept without even noticing or questioning it. A repeated pattern gets filed away in our minds as settled, and once something feels settled, we stop checking on it. Working out whether that pattern still fits what is needed takes a different and more deliberate kind of attention, the sort that doesn’t even occur to us to spend on a relationship that already feels secure. A person who has been consistent long enough earns a kind of credit nobody has actually gone back and verified, and the people around them keep expecting it simply because it is there: it is simply taken for granted. That is not really a failure of character on anyone's part. It is closer to a failure of attention. Understanding that has changed how I work with clients who arrive convinced that someone simply stopped being reliable, when what actually happened is harder to see and a good deal more ordinary.

 Where reliability comes from.

 Again, I take the long view:  Cooperation among early humans depended on being able to predict whether the person hunting beside you, or caring for your children, or sharing your camp, would actually do what the arrangement called for. Biologists call this reciprocal altruism, the idea that creatures help each other even at a cost to themselves because they expect the favour to be returned eventually, and that expectation is reliability working at the level of survival rather than at the level of any one relationship.

What is striking is how much effort early human societies put into making reliability visible long before we were capable of conceiving of writing or pinning down commitments in contracts. Reputation did that work. People count on people they can count on.

So did kinship obligation, ritual, and public promises made in front of witnesses. All of these gave a group some way of knowing, in advance, whether its members would actually follow through, because a group that could not predict the behaviour of its own members could not hunt together, defend itself, or raise its children with any confidence. Reliability was solving a basic problem long before anyone thought to call it a virtue. The quick, almost automatic way we still size each other up for reliability, often within the first few minutes of meeting someone, is very likely left over from exactly this pressure. However, when that assessment turns out to be wrong, it affects both the person doing the judging and the person being judged. "You have become unreliable." "I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't changed. You have. You're looking for something that was never there!" So reliability and consistency go hand in hand. Judgment is always risky. We get it right often enough that we keep doing it, but when it goes wrong it can get really ugly.

That quick instinct also explains why our sense of someone's reliability so rarely comes from sitting down and weighing the evidence. Most of the time we simply feel it, often before we could put a reason to it, built out of small things like tone, timing, and the particular way a person explains themselves when they fall short. That feeling then shapes our judgment and how we behave toward someone long before any slower, more careful thinking gets a chance to check it. Typically that slower checking never really happens. When the person shows up as unreliable, in our eyes, the reaction ranges from mild disappointment to a train-wreck.

It is worth knowing this about ourselves, because it means the grievances people bring to mediation are almost never the product of careful reasoning. They are felt first and explained afterward, and the explanation usually arrives well behind the feeling that produced it.

 The benefits, and what they cost.

 The benefits of being reliable are easy to list, and nobody disputes them. Reliable people get handed more responsibility. They get the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong. Every kept promise adds a little to a reserve that can be drawn on later, when circumstances get difficult and that reserve is needed. (As Franklin Covey demonstrated so succinctly with his trust bank account analogy.) Reliability also lightens the load on everyone nearby, since less energy has to go into checking up, following up, and bracing for disappointment, and that saved energy tends to go somewhere useful: into growth, into creativity, into the kind of risk that only feels possible when the ground underneath it is solid.

 The costs get talked about far less, and I have come to think they deserve more attention than they get. A person who has spent years building an identity around being reliable often struggles to renegotiate what is expected of them once their circumstances change, because the people around them have grown used to a level of output that may no longer be realistic, and the reliable person tends to absorb that strain quietly rather than risk being seen as having let someone down

 There is a related cost that is harder to see from the outside. Reliability can slowly turn into a habit of doing what is expected long after it stops matching what a person actually wants or believes, because the reward for staying consistent keeps coming in faster than any permission to change. I have come across more than one person whose exhaustion had nothing to do with any single broken promise and everything to do with decades of keeping every single one, at a cost nobody around them ever had reason to notice, because the whole point of reliability is that it never announces what it is costing the person providing it.

 What shapes a struggle like that is usually not a character flaw, and it is not really a failure of personal boundaries either, even though that is the language people often reach for. It is a structural problem. Once reliability has become the foundation a relationship is built on, renegotiating it becomes very hard to do without the renegotiation itself being experienced as a breach: the very thing the relationship was built to avoid. Seeing that clearly is often where the real work in mediation and coaching begins, because the goal is rarely to make a reliable person less reliable. What I try to help people build is not a more reliability. It's a relationship that can absorb a knock without deciding the whole thing was rotten to begin with.

I referred to:

Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Eric Edmeades: The Evolution Gap